


Starbuck Lost Beneath the Waves

by se_parsons



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:22:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27535210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/se_parsons/pseuds/se_parsons
Summary: Originally Posted 29 Jun 1999SPOILER WARNING: Everything I can think of plus shit I make up.RATING: PG-13CLASSIFICATION: Story, Scully-angst, UST, Mulder-angst, and did I mention angst?  Um, I guess the character death warning goes here.KEYWORDS: Angst, desolation, death, destruction?  Just pray to Kali now and get it over with.SUMMARY: Scully and Mulder get old.  And someone croaks.  But no one has sex, so it's ok for the kiddies.
Relationships: Fox Mulder/Dana Scully
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	Starbuck Lost Beneath the Waves

"Is that one of the Venerables?" Special Agent John Wing asked his newly- assigned partner Special Agent Maria Velazquez on his first day at the cafeteria in the Hoover Building.

Maria didn't just crane her neck like any normal person, she turned one hundred and eighty degrees around in her chair to stare at the small, white-haired woman in the severely tailored suit just now paying for her salad and ice tea.

"That?" she asked, and John was surprised to learn that his partner's melodic voice could hold such an extreme degree of disdain. He would do his best to make certain it was never directed at him.

"Yes," John hissed quietly leaning over his tray so close that he feared soiling his new suit in his watery cafeteria mashed potatoes. "You don't have to stare like that and make it obvious, you know."

"But everyone always stares at a Freak Show," Maria told him, turning back around and taking a sip of her coffee, black, thanks. The kind of coffee that "real" FBI agents drank. The kind that always gave him heartburn.

John looked at the straight back of the woman as she walked to an empty table in the corner, the one that everyone else seemed to steer clear of. The one he was now wondering if everyone knew was hers. Everyone, it seemed, but him. 

The woman seemed unremarkable in the extreme, except, perhaps for her age.

She had to be nearing 65 if she hadn't topped it already, though it only really showed around her neck and hands. And by 65 FBI agents were either dead, running something, or retired.

Her posture was perfectly erect, though she wasn't tall, and her silvery hair was neatly coifed and trimmed in an absolutely acceptable modern style. Her suit was perfectly tailored to fit her slim body, and her legs were, well if they looked this good at her age they must have been great when she was younger. She had a roman nose and even features. She might have been pretty once, though not in any conventional way. She didn't look like a freak. She looked like somebody's rather fussy old grandma. Probably had a neat house somewhere filled with pretty objects that little kids weren't allowed to touch. That's what she seemed like to John.

"Why did you call her a freak?" he asked Velazquez, running a hand nervously through his close-cropped black hair. "She seems normal enough to me."

"Because she is a freak, Wing," Maria looked over to where the old woman was picking at her salad while she flipped through the contents of a very old and battered manila file folder. "I can't believe you don't know who she is."

"Sorry," Wing said.

"You mean you've never heard of the Spook? The last of the Conspiracy Theorists?" Velazquez asked, inspecting her perfectly manicured red fingernails. They were a little long and totally the wrong color for FBI norm, but Velazquez was known around the Bureau to have "flair".

"No way," Wing replied. "No way is that her. She's totally normal." 

"You haven't tried to talk to her," Velazquez told him. "You haven't been in on an autopsy where she pulls some bug out of some corpse's ass and tells you it was genetically engineered by aliens to carry some sort of Doomsday plague. Or that the reason you can't catch your latest serial murderer is that he's really a vampire."

"If she comes up with crap like that all the time, why don't they just fire her or put her in the nuthouse?" Wing asked, tucking his tie behind the table edge and taking a spoonful of the watery potatoes.

"Because she doesn't come up with it all the time," Velazquez told him.

"Because she only comes up with it sometimes. And the rest of the time she comes up with stuff that every other pathologist at the FBI would probably have overlooked. And with that stuff that every other pathologist would have overlooked, she helps us solve our cases. And she never really fucks up. No matter how obsessed she is. No matter how she rants on about Them taking her partner. She never fucks up badly enough to lose her place in the Bureau.

"I'm sure she does it on purpose. Because if she did get kicked out. If she did retire, that would mean that she'd no longer have the authority to go on looking. And looking is all she's done for the past 30 years."

"Looking for Spooky Mulder," Wing said shaking his head in incredulity.

"You got it," Velazquez agreed, sipping her black coffee. Wing looked over at the white-haired woman pouring over the ancient file. The file he surmised belonged to her long-lost partner, Spooky Mulder.

What had been his first name really? John didn't think he'd ever known it, just as he didn't know hers. He just knew her last name - the name everyone at the Bureau called her when they weren't bothering to make fun - Scully.

So Scully had spent 30 years looking for her lost partner, Mulder. It was scary, really. Obsession like that. And Mulder had been the one rumored to have been obsessive, Scully had been the rational one. At least that's what he'd been told at the Academy when he'd learned about the footnote in Bureau history that had been the X- Files.

FBI agents on the trail of UFOs and unexplained phenomena. It was unbelievable. Like something you'd see on the scifi channel with guys in rubber suits.

And Scully and her quest also sort of reminded him of a song his grandma had played for him when he was a little boy, something she'd called "disco-dance-pop" a song about someone called Lola who sat at some nightclub and pretended she was going to meet her dead boyfriend. It was creepy.

John took a sip of his own black coffee and didn't make a face at the bitterness as it went down to his, thankfully, full stomach. That would probably help keep him from getting acid indigestion this time anyway.

But then he thought about it again. About Scully, about Mulder. And he looked across the table at his own partner, going through the notes they'd taken that morning at their briefing with the AD about their next case. His first as a Special Agent. And John Wing wondered what she would do if he just up and disappeared one day. And he knew the answer was for damned sure not - look for him for 30 years.

And it made him wonder. Why had Scully done it?

"Yes, Mom, I'll be down to see you all next weekend," Scully said into the phone, slightly loud so that her mother would be certain to hear her. At 91, Maggie was getting rather deaf. "But this weekend I just need to get away. I've taken a cottage at the beach on the Vineyard. No, no, it was very reasonable because it's offseason. What do you mean, what will I do? I'll go for walks with Moby, for one. He's getting really fat lolling around the house all the time. He really looks like a white whale." Scully patted the huge Pyrennes hound affectionately on the head.

"No, I just need some peace and quiet with no one around. They had me demonstrating techniques for new agents last week and I'm really just on my last nerve.

You'd think with all the new high-tech methods they all have at their disposal, they'd be better at it. But when it comes to actually searching a body, they know nothing at all.

They don't have the slightest clue what to look for, really. It's almost disgusting.

"Ok, well, say "hi" to everyone for me. I love you, too."

Scully hung up the phone with a sigh and went over to close her suitcase. She was really grateful to be going out of the city for the weekend, and she also viewed the location as a personal triumph for her. It was the first time she'd been able to bring herself to look at a beach anywhere near Massachusetts since he'd disappeared 29 years before. Well, it would be 29 years tomorrow. That was if he'd actually disappeared on Saturday rather than Sunday, but she didn't know that and after all the years of searching she'd never found it out.

And her destination was Chilmark, not the place she'd gone with him to his father's house so many years before, but the place where he'd lived when Sam had been taken and his life had been set on the course that had brought him to her. It was a little place, a beach house not used by the owners in the winter though it had central heating and a fireplace, the rental agent had assured her. But the owners were elderly and had retired to Florida, and only spent the best months of the year along the coast, and October wasn't exactly the best month along the coast of Massachusetts.

Scully picked up her suitcase and whistled for Moby. He came trotting along behind her, his leash in his mouth, the picture of the perfect pet. It was a good thing, too, because he outweighed her by about 40 pounds. If he'd wanted to disobey she'd have been out of luck. But he never did. The opposite of his namesake. She picked up her purse and laptop case by the door and lugged the lot down to her car, after making certain the door to the house was locked, of course. She wouldn't want anything to happen to it while she was gone. She loved her little house.

And to think the pangs it had given her when she'd first bought it 22 years before. The worry that he might come back, look for her, and find her gone. But it had never happened. It never would happen. He was never coming back.

And that was what Special Agent Dana Scully, less than six months from mandatory retirement was going off to do. Putting her luggage in her car on October thirteenth, Fox Mulder's sixty-seventh birthday, she was going up to Massachusetts, the place of his fondest and worst memories, to finally say goodbye. To finally give him up to God, or the elements or whatever was out in the limitless universe that might be ready to receive the news of her defeat. No not defeat, but surrender. She was tired. She was old. She'd spent nearly 30 years looking and now was the time for it to end.

She'd considered what she would do after it was all over, after the end of the search many many times. And in her years of sleepless nights many strange thoughts had come to her. She had imagined herself doing any number of things. Saying goodbye and then going off to make a life for herself that had to do with life.

Saying goodbye and putting a bullet in her brain. 

Saying goodbye and going home to take an entire bottle of sleeping pills washed down with Bushmills.

Saying goodbye and sinking into a wonderful hot bath to open the vein in her arm from wrist to elbow.

But when she'd been younger, the hope of finally finding him, or finding what had become of him had kept her from doing any of them. And later.... Well, she'd finally just forgotten what else there was in life other than her quest to find Mulder.

Perhaps that's how it had been for him with Samantha. Forgetting at last who he was in the world other than "the one who looks for Samantha". That's what she'd become finally, as all her friends and colleagues and eventually her family, had dropped by the wayside. She had become only "the one who looks for Mulder". Empty but for that one driving purpose.

It had been no way to live a life.

But what other choice could she have had, really? What choice could there have been when she knew to the bottom of her soul that he would have done exactly the same for her.

And the fact of the matter was, by the time he'd disappeared seven and a half years into their partnership, the day after his thirty-ninth birthday, they'd both pretty much worn one another down until no one else could fit in the space where each of them belonged. There could be no other man for Scully, and for Mulder...

She liked to imagine she would have been the only one for him. And what did it matter now, anyway? It could be any way she wanted. Why not let it be the one that was the most comforting?

Scully closed the trunk and opened the passenger door for Moby. The dog leaped into his place and bounced excitedly in anticipation of a trip. It was good that someone was looking forward to the drive. Traffic out of the D.C. area on a Friday was brutal. But putting it off wasn't getting her away any quicker, so Scully buckled down as she always did when there was something unpleasant to be done, and buckled up to begin her drive to make her final farewell.

Scully arrived late at her rented cottage after a hellacious drive through pouring rain and stop and go traffic all the way past New Haven. She had no time to do anything but let the dog out to pee and fall into bed before passing out with exhaustion. She was amazed sometimes to remember how she had been able to just leap out of bed on a moment's notice to go running off with Mulder on some alien or paranormal chase any time of the day or night. Now she needed her sleep. And sometimes she didn't even want to get out of bed in the morning.

Where had she gone? And how many years had she been lost, herself?

She didn't like to think.

Deliberately, she fried herself an egg and microwaved three slices of bacon, one for herself and two for the dog, ate, and then put on jeans and a thick fisherman's sweater to take the walk along the beach that she'd promised herself for so long. She wanted to look at the places of his youth and to finally let him go. Before she was gone, herself.

Before she forgot. Before she grew too old to do it properly.

She was only a few steps along the beach when she realized she had it practically to herself, and let the dog loose to romp in the sand. At ten, Moby was older than she was, but he still liked to run around like a puppy, and seeing he'd always been white, the years had been kinder to him than to herself.

She wondered what Mulder would think to see her now. He probably wouldn't even recognize her.

Scully slogged through the loose sand into a stiff wind. Fortunately, it had blown the clouds away and the day was brightly sunny, warming the air slightly when the wind didn't blow too hard to offset the effect. But it had to be close to sixty. A beautiful day, all in all.

Walking through the sand was harder than Scully remembered, but it had been years since she'd been on the beach for any length of time. Usually, it was just the trip with Matt or Billy or Missy and their kids. Watching the little ones play in the water while their grandparents smiled dotingly on. Charlie and Bill both were proud patriarchs and Scully had found herself seeing them less and less as time wore on mostly because they grew so insufferable with the addition of each new fruit of their loins.

The dog was getting too far ahead.

"Moby!" she shouted. "Moby, come back here!"

In calling her dog she used her "drop it, you dirty son-of-a-bitching perp" voice, and it worked wonders as always, causing the big, white animal doofus to perk up his ears and trot obediently back toward his mistress shuffling her way along the sand. It also disturbed some of her neighbors, out that morning fixing a retaining fence along their section of the beach.

"Sorry," she said sheepishly, not really looking at them, just taking in that it was obviously a father and son, doing family-type chores on their vacation home. She forgot sometimes what she must look, and sound like, to others. She was alone so much. She continued on down the beach until the Pyrenees returned to her and ran in circles around her, his tongue lolling in happy exhaustion from his leg-stretching run.

Scully was getting tired, too. She debated going back toward her rental, but it was such a nice morning, and she hadn't anything at all to do, that she decided instead to continue along the beach to a small outcropping of rocks jutting out into the ocean. It was as good a place as any. And private enough at this time of year. She'd make her goodbyes there and rest at the same time.

As she made her way down the beach the wind veered around enough to carry the words of her neighbor's son to her ears when she should have been far enough away for him to make the comment in privacy.

"There's one for ya, Dad."

The boy had the flat accent common to the region, and a voice made slightly raspy by the wind. His father's comment, if he made any, was carried away by another gust.

A freakshow here as well. Scully sighed, and then shrugged to herself. She'd never see them again, so what did it matter?

She climbed up on the rocks, Moby following a little way and then stopping because of the sharpness on his tender paws. He gingerly picked his way back down to the beach and lay at the base of the outcropping of stone, waiting patiently for her to get about her business.

Just as she neared the top, she heard a small, "Hi."

Turning her head, she saw it was a little girl. Maybe seven or eight years old, gathering driftwood into a suspicious-looking pile.

"Hi, yourself," Scully replied.

"What are you doing here?" the girl asked her, as if she owned the place. She had straight, brown hair drawn into a messy ponytail and bright blue eyes. There was a big smudge of dirt on her left cheek. "No one ever comes up here. Not even Grampa."

"I'm climbing up here," Scully said. She'd never been really good with children. She'd never really been around them.

"Why?" the little girl asked.

"Because I wanted to," Scully replied.

"Well, why did you want to, then?" the little thing was becoming rather impatient. "It's not for old people. You could break a hip."

"Well, if I do, I certainly hope you'll be able to give me first aid and call an ambulance," Scully replied, amused at the girl's ire for having her illicit fire discovered before it had even been lit. She could remember countless times when similar things had happened to her, and her own anger at having her tiny plans so unfairly thwarted by the universe. "And you'd better make that in a bigger hole or someone will be sure to see it."

"You mean you're not going to tell?" the girl was wide-eyed now.

"Not if you make it in a deeper hole," Scully replied. "There's not much to burn here, so unless you set yourself on fire, I don't see as you'll be doing any harm."

"Ok," the girl said cautiously. "But why are you here? No one usually comes up here. They usually leave me alone."

"Who does?" Scully asked.

"My brothers, my dad, Grampa and Gramma."

"Well, I can leave you alone, too," Scully told her. "I want to go out closer to the water, anyway."

"But why up here?" the girl was persistent, Scully had to give her credit for that.

"You're awfully nosy for a perfect stranger, aren't you?" Scully said, blue eyes flashing in annoyance.

"You're the stranger," the girl replied, her own blue eyes snapping right back. "I live here."

"Then you should make me welcome," Scully replied.

"Why? You're not very nice," the girl told her, small hands on hips as she continued to kneel beside her firewood.

"But that doesn't mean you should be rude, does it?" Scully told her. 

"And you're just angry that I caught you doing something you shouldn't be doing, anyway. I told you I wouldn't tell, so why not just leave me alone."

"Fine," the girl said angrily, curiosity unsatisfied.

"Fine," Scully replied evenly and continued on out toward the sea.

She finally made her way out onto an overhang of rock that overlooked the waves. As always when confronted with a high place, she briefly considered flinging herself off and hurling herself to her death, but that thought was immediately put aside at the prospect of the little girl finding her body crushed and broken on the rocks.

Gingerly she sat herself down, close to the edge, but not so close that she could not easily come back again. And she looked eastward into the sea.

As a girl she'd always loved the sea. It reminded her of her father, for he'd always been a sailor, and it was inextricably entwined with the life of her family and her own life. For years it had been her friend, it had rejuvenated her, renewed her. Until Mulder had almost drowned in it, after leaping off the ghost ship, the Queen Anne. And when he had returned he'd told her that he loved her, having faced his own death in the sea and needing to say it at last. And then she had realized that the sea was dark, and deep, and wild, and all the wicked things that Melville had written when she had all along believed it was her friend.

She'd not been to the sea in years. And now she saw it as it was. Not her friend, but neither wicked nor good. It simply was. It was a thing, like the sky, or the little girl, or the rocks on which she sat. Neither good nor evil, but there. With no meaning but what they meant to her.

Just as Mulder now was. A legend of a madman, a thing, a story that everyone remembered but no one ever got right. No one but her. Because only through her memory was it truly given meaning. Or was it given meaning truly. Or, she didn't know what. She only remembered. She only looked.

But now she was done.

She was done and he was truly dead at last.

Scully didn't cry. Her tears had all been shed years before when she herself had still been alive, when there had still been things to want when she'd still had hope. But now her hope was all burned out and the coldness of the stone, the wind and the ocean touching her, but outside of her, were all that remained. She was empty. Empty of hope, empty of love, empty even of sorrow because sorrow was something - something in the emptiness no matter that it hurt. And now she simply looked out at the roiling waves and thought of him, the thing that had made her complete, severed from her 29 years before to the very day. Mulder would have been sixty-seven. What would he have thought of her now, brittle, old, dried-up thing that she was?

Scully stared at the ocean until the wind burned her eyes red as though she had been crying. It was the least she could do for him. It was the only thing she could do for him.

"She's over here," the little girl's voice cut through her consciousness like a knife, stabbing her unpleasantly in her only remaining sensitive spot - her need for solitude. She'd grown so tired of explaining. She'd grown so tired of everything.

Scully shut her eyes, steeling herself for the unpleasant necessity of having to talk to people she didn't know. She hoped she could get away from them quickly, so she could be alone again with Mulder. Alone with him in the only way that remained to her.

"Excuse me, ma'am, but are you all right?" came the voice of the little girl's companion from behind her, and damn her if she wasn't so far gone that it sounded like him. She knew the sound of his voice even after all these years.

"I'm fine," she replied, not looking back. She couldn't bear to look back and see that it wasn't him. She'd just hold the sound close to her as a special belated Mulder- birthday gift, even if she had only imagined it.

"Excuse me again, but I don't think you are," the voice said again, and Scully closed her eyes.

"Please just leave me alone," she asked, angry at herself when her voice broke as she did so.

"You're...you're not planning to jump off this rock here, now, are you?" the voice asked her. "I know it's none of my business, but I don't know any woman your age who would come climbing up here just for fun. Not climb up here and not stay so long."

"I have no intention whatsoever of jumping, if that's what you're worried about," Scully said, angry at her voice for sounding so bitter and cutting when he sounded so much like... But she was only imagining it. He did NOT sound like Mulder, not really. He was just an old man with a rickety fence. 

"Well that's not how it looks to me. And that's not how it looks to the Missus, either," he told her. "She'd like it very much if you'd come down to the house and have a cup of tea with her. Maybe it would help if you talked to somebody."

"No," Scully snapped, then she continued through gritted teeth.

"Thank you, it's very kind of you to offer, but I really just want to be left alone, ok?"

"When did he die?" the old man asked her, and Scully could hear him take a few steps closer, nearer to her on the rock.

"What do you mean?" she asked. "What are you talking about?"

"Look, I really don't mean to pry, but I've never seen anyone so obviously a widow in my life. I wouldn't bother you except that you seem to have a real problem, here, and I just can't let somebody jump off the cliff on my property without trying to talk them out of it. Especially not in front of my granddaughter."

"I am NOT going to jump off the cliff, ok?" Scully said, getting up quickly from her seat on the rock, knees and hips creaking with protest and stiffness from the cold, and whirling around on the man who was being just as annoying as his granddaughter had been before. What the hell was wrong with these people, anyway? If she was so obviously grieving, why couldn't they just let her alone?

He was standing there, just about ten feet from her, the little girl holding onto the back of his jacket and looking very distressed. His face was open, concerned and measuring, trying to assess whether he would need to make a grab at her to keep her from doing something stupid. It was also perfectly familiar, even aged as it was, with deep lines around the hazel eyes and across the forehead made slightly more prominent by the slight recession of his hairline. It was him. Alive and there and standing on the same rock as she was. Mulder.

Scully thought she was having a heart attack.

She'd heard about what they felt like, shooting pains and then numbness. Well, that was what she was experiencing. Her chest had constricted beyond the point of any ability to breathe and her hands had begun to shake, but she couldn't feel them anymore at all.

The universe had narrowed to his face, Mulder's face. After almost thirty years, to see it, and then have it snatched brutally away once more... 

But even as she looked at him, she knew. She knew that he didn't know. He didn't recognize her. He didn't know who she was. She was nothing to him. Nothing more than some crazy, old woman who might do something to potentially harm his grandchild.

His grandchild. So he'd had a life at least. That was good. At least one of them had.

Scully closed her eyes and toppled forward.

She didn't feel herself hit the rock.

"I still don't believe it, an FBI agent?" a woman's voice cut through the rushing in Scully's ears as she lay somewhere soft and entirely too warm. A voice with the broad a's of New England Stamped all over it.

"That's what her ID says, right here, Mom. Special Agent, Dana Scully," it was the son's voice. The one with the flat, local accent. Took after his mother, apparently.

"And there's a badge, too. And her driver's license says Alexandria, Virginia."

"And she just fainted dead away up on top of that rock," the woman said, sounding dubious. 

"Yes," said Mulder.

Scully closed her eyes and prayed for death. He didn't come. It seemed even HE didn't want her now.

"And do you have any idea why?" the woman continued. It seemed that she was in charge.

"She was gonna kill herself, Gramma," the little girl, this time.

Wonderful. The kid thought she was a looney, too.

"What made you think that?"

"What person our age in their right mind would go climbing up on those rocks, Cyndi?" Mulder asked.

Cyndi? He'd married a woman named Cyndi?

Scully nearly gagged.

"You do it all the time, and so do I," Cyndi replied.

"Go, Cyndi!" Scully rooted silently. "Kick his ass!"

"Yes, but we live here," he replied. "We're not tourists. And we don't look like that."

"What are you talking about, Bill?" Cyndi said.

"She looks so lost," Mulder replied. "Like she's at the end of... well, of everything."

"I don't know why you start imagining these things about people, Bill," Cyndi told him sternly. "You just see them and then you start making up stories about them in your own head and convince yourself that that's really what they're thinking and what they're doing. I swear, you should have been a writer, the way you make things up."

"He's right, Mom," the son stood up for Mulder. "She's really very frail-looking, like she's broken. Maybe she has cancer. Maybe that's why she was going to kill herself."

"Scott, you know you're just imagining that because of what happened to our Dana," Cyndi told the young man. "Just because she has the same name and because she doesn't seem right to you, doesn't mean it's that. You really are imagining it. Don't let Bill influence you like that."

"I don't know, Mom, it's what it seems like," the young man replied.

That was interesting, Scully thought. They'd had someone "our Dana" who had died of cancer. In the family, it sounded like. The young man's wife, perhaps?

"Well it would be a reason," Mulder agreed. "She's obviously mourning something. And she's around our age, I guess. The right age for it."

"And what age would that be, then?" Cyndi replied. "I know that I'm fifty-nine, but how old would you be?"

"Sixty-seven," Scully thought.

"Did you hear something?" the young man asked his parents. "It sounded like it came from the spare room."

She must have said it out loud.

She couldn't pretend to be unconscious any more, so Scully steeled herself to face the music. To face Mulder and his family.

Scully opened her eyes and saw all of them there, crowding into the doorway. Mulder, the son and the little girl, standing there and looking in on her. And in the room, laying a cool hand on her forehead was Cyndi, Mulder's wife. The owner of the determined New England voice and iron-willed practicality.

"Are you awake?" Cyndi asked, blue eyes searching Scully's own for signs of injury. "Do you know where you are?"

"Yes," Scully replied, not trusting herself to say more. "In a house. Yours, I suppose."

She moved to sit up, but Cyndi put a restraining hand on her shoulder.

"You probably shouldn't do that. You fainted up on that rock, you know."

"I'm well aware of that Mrs....?" Scully asked, ignoring the hand and sitting up anyway. It was easy enough. Cyndi was no bigger than herself.

"Melville," Cyndi replied. "Cyndi Melville. This is my husband, Bill, our son-in-law Scott, and our granddaughter Elizabeth. But you really shouldn't be sitting up so quickly."

"I'm fine," Scully told her. "And I'm really quite capable of assessing my own physical condition, thank you. I'm a medical doctor."

"Your ID says you're an FBI agent," Scott said.

"That's because I am an FBI agent," Scully replied, pushing back the quilt and swinging her legs over the side of the bed. "I'm a forensic pathologist with the Bureau, and despite the fact that I spend most of my time with the dead, I have the training to make diagnoses on the living. My diagnosis on myself was that I had been sitting on the rock too long, stood up too quickly, and gave myself the mother of all headrushes. Blacked right out. I have a tendency to forget how old I

am."

"How old?" the little girl asked. "As old as grandma?"

"Probably older," Scully replied. "I'm sixty-four. I'll be sixty-five in March."

"What day?" Elizabeth asked.

"March 23, why?"

"Because that's grandpa's birthday, too," Elizabeth smiled.

"How interesting," Scully said blankly. He didn't know. He didn't know and she wasn't going to tell him. She knew that much already. He was happy now. And she wouldn't do anything to destroy that. Not anything. "What a coincidence."

"But Grampa doesn't know how old he is," Elizabeth informed her.

"Really?" Scully said conversationally. She had to get out of there. She had to get out before she slipped and revealed something. Before Mulder spoke to her, himself. She'd never been able to resist a request from him.

"That's enough, Elizabeth," Mulder spoke up at last, his rough voice running into her like wine. "You don't want to bore the lady with our problems."

"But maybe we should," Cyndi said looking Scully over speculatively and then turning back to her husband. "You know we never did try going to the FBI, Bill."

"The police said they were going to do that. That they'd try all the government databases," Mulder said. He looked somewhat uncomfortable. "She doesn't need to hear about it."

Scully looked at Cyndi. It would obviously be up to her to decide. She tried to keep her face neutral, neither curious nor impatient. It would be entirely up to the other woman. Not Scully's decision at all.

"Do you work on missing persons cases?" Cyndi asked her, folding her arms across her narrow chest and tilting her brunette head to one side quizzically.

"Almost all the cases I work on could be classified that way," Scully said. "Remember, my patients are dead. I try to find out how they got that way. And many of them aren't really corpses at all in any sense of the word. Sometimes they've been missing so long that all that's left is a pile of bones and maybe a few fragments of hair."

"What about live people?" Cyndi pressed, and Scully was reminded of her mother at a similar age.

"There are other people who handle that, but I've worked on missing persons cases before. Quite a number of them, in fact," Scully answered honestly.

"Then maybe you can help us about Bill," Cyndi said.

"He doesn't seem missing to me," Scully replied, dragging a polite smile up from some hitherto unknown reaches of her soul. "In fact, he seems to be exactly where he belongs."

"That's because I am," Mulder agreed, but he looked as determined as his wife. "Because I am NOW. But.... I think that I maybe used to belong somewhere else before. You see, I don't remember anything before I was, say, about thirty-five."

"Thirty-nine," Scully corrected in her head. 

"Really?" is what she said aloud. "What happened?"

"I don't know," Mulder answered. "That's the part that really sucks, you see. I just woke up one day and I was in the hospital. I didn't know who I was. Why I was there. Where I was. Or even really that it was a hospital. I had to learn all that later."

"What happened to you?" Scully asked. "What caused you to be like that?"

"Probably because someone had bashed my head in with a blunt instrument of some kind. Maybe a tire iron. Or a crowbar, or something like that. That's what the police said, anyway," Mulder replied.

"Look, if we're going to do this, why don't we move into the kitchen where we can all sit down," Cyndi suggested. "I'll make us all some tea."

"Thank you Mrs. Melville," Scully said, standing up and damning her inwardly. She might have been able to get away if that hadn't been suggested. But the woman was a good hostess. And thoughtful. Scully was trapped by her hospitality.

Scully followed them out of the bedroom and down a short hallway to Cyndi's bright kitchen. She sat down in a chair to one side, indicated to her by Mulder - that was still the only way she could think of the man before her no matter what he now called himself - and he took his own place at the head of the table. Scully was somewhat surprised when Elizabeth pulled out the chair to her right and climbed right up in it as though this was all her business as well. Her father, Scott, sat down across from Scully.

"So someone assaulted you?" Scully asked Mulder, to get this over with sooner rather than later. But she couldn't pretend to herself that she didn't want to know.

"You could say that," Mulder replied. "The police said they thought whoever it was was deliberately trying to kill me and make it look like a random attack. They said the blows were "professional" and designed to cause maximum injury in the least amount of time. And they didn't bother with my face. The blows were to the back of the head, designed to, well, basically to pulverize my skull. And they did a pretty good job of it, too. They had to put a plate in the back there, to put me back together again. And I was mostly paralyzed on my left side for a couple of years.

"The reason they really thought it was "professional" though was the way they made sure that everything that could have identified me was removed from my clothes. All my ID, watch, rings whatever else I might have had. On the surface, it looked pretty much like a robbery, I was apparently pretty well-dressed."

"You could say that again," Cyndi snorted putting tea bags into a bright, china pot. "You were wearing an Armani suit."

"Anyway," Mulder ignored his wife's interruption. "But every scrap of paper was gone, there wasn't even any change in my pockets. Except for one pocket, on the inside of my suit jacket, that they just didn't bother to look in, I guess. It's one of the ones that no one ever really uses. Used to be for a pocketwatch or whatever."

"I know the one you mean," Scully replied.

"Yeah, well, when they searched my suit again, just before they were going to get rid of it, they found these," Mulder reached into his back pocket and pulled out a battered brown wallet. "I carry them with me still, just in case I ever meet anyone to show them to. They're pretty beat up now, but they were when the police found them, too. It looks like I'd been carrying them for a while."

Mulder pulled two snapshots out of his wallet and placed them on the table in front of her.

Scully looked at them, and her heart turned over in her chest. Her mouth was suddenly very dry. She wished Cyndi would hurry with the tea.

"I think.... I think," Mulder said, his voice filled with a pain that was all too familiar to her. "I think they must be my wife and my daughter."

"I don't think so, Mr. Melville," Scully said, picking up the snapshot of the dark-haired child and looking at it thoughtfully. She had to set his mind at rest about this misassumption at least. "I mean, look at the little girl, the way she's dressed. Look at the way the color's faded on the photograph. I think the picture is older than that. Older than thirty years old. I don't think you could have had a child that would have been that age in a picture taken that long ago. It had to be before they'd really fixed the color film process. And that didn't happen until post 1985 or so. With the fading on this photograph I'd date it as having been taken in the nineteen seventies. And from the girl's clothing... I mean, I had a peasant top just like that when I was that age. And they haven't really been in style much since then. In the nineties among college students, but not for little children."

"You mean you don't think she's my daughter," Mulder sounded relieved, relieved but curious. "Who is she, then? And why would I have her picture?"

"She looks a little like you, maybe she's a relative," Scully suggested, though she wanted to scream, "It's Samantha! It's your sister, you idiot!" at the top of her lungs.

"But she could be my daughter, then, too. If she looks like me. Can you tell me anything about the other picture?" Mulder asked, pushing it forward along the tabletop.

Scully looked at this one, but she couldn't bear to pick it up. "I...it was taken later than the other one," she said, looking at it though she didn't really have to tell everything about it. She could have described it in her sleep. "Better color developing process. The man looks like you....."

"And the woman?" Mulder asked. "I think she must have been my wife. I mean look at the way I'm looking at her. And I've got my arm around her."

"No offense, honey," Mulder added as Cyndi put a cup for his tea beside him on the table.

"None taken," Cyndi said distributing more cups around the table, and a glass of milk for Elizabeth. "I just feel so sorry for her, if she was. I mean think of that. Having you just not come home one day and then never knowing what had happened. It would be like losing someone in a war."

It wouldn't be LIKE losing someone in a war. It would BE losing someone in a war. Losing Mulder in one. Scully had no doubt that that's what it had been. That They had finally decided to kill him, but that by some miracle They'd made an error and he'd survived. And They'd probably allowed him to continue to survive because he'd never remembered who he was.

Scully couldn't tell him. No matter how much he wanted it.

"This picture, even more than the other one," Mulder went on, pointing one long finger at the picture of them before Scully on the tabletop. "This one haunts me, because I... I dream about her sometimes. I can't remember her name, but I see her face in front of me, just like that. And there's this.... incredible sense of loss. And I wake up and I think "They took her away from me again." It's the same every time though every dream is different. The knowledge that They took her away. Whoever They are. Maybe the same They that tried to kill me.

"And it's so awful," Mulder's voice broke and he cleared his throat before he began again. "I mean, the only thing that I could say when I woke up in the hospital was, "They're going to take Starbuck" over and over. And I know, even though it seems strange, I know that SHE'S Starbuck. And that I was sure that they were going to kill her, and take her away from me. That was the only thing that I could remember. This need to find her and protect her.

"And... and I never could. And I've been trying. Trying now for thirty years," Mulder went on. "And I've asked everyone I can think of. The groups that reunite families with adoptees, missing persons societies. Except that they're just not designed for the person who is missing to find who they're missing from. They're all designed to do it the other way around. Cyndi and I have written letters, and Scott put the pictures up on websites, and there's been nothing.

"And if They did hurt her. If Starbuck was taken, she would never have been able to look for me, either. So it wouldn't be happening that way.

"But I never asked the FBI. The police said they would do that. But maybe they didn't. When they realized I wasn't going to remember who had attacked me, they didn't seem very interested any more. Is there some place you could check for her? To see if she was taken, if someone put out a missing persons report on her?"

"I'd have to have a name, Mr. Melville," Scully said, looking at him carefully, taking in his expression. It was one she knew well. One she'd seen him wear countless times when he'd been elbow deep in the conspiracy that had deprived him of his sister, had blighted his life. It seemed that even this incarnation of Mulder hadn't been free of loss. "I don't think anyone would recognize Starbuck."

"Yes," Mulder said, looking at her assessing him. "That IS how I got my name, too. Seeing I didn't remember anything else. I read Moby Dick while I was learning how to read again. And I took my name from that, from that and from William Blake. I... I really like his poetry."

"Depressing," Scully said.

"Yes, but beautiful," Mulder replied.

"Is there anything you can do to help us Ms. Scully?" Cyndi asked, bringing the hot tea to the table and filling cups all around. "This has been preying on my husband's mind for.... well, for as long as I've known him."

"Which is about as long as I can remember," Mulder said, smiling warmly at his wife, his love for her shining from his eyes. "It was really almost like a fairy tale. I woke up one day and there was Cyndi standing over me. One look at those big blue eyes and I was a lost man."

"I was his physical therapist," Cyndi explained, taking her seat between her husband and her son-in-law . "It was a wonder he could stand me at all after the hell I put him through."

Mulder reached out to take his wife's hand in his. Scully couldn't help but watch how he ran his thumb in absent-minded affection over the back of it as they continued to talk.

"Do you think you could check somehow, through the FBI?" Mulder asked. "I can't begin to tell you how much it would mean to me and my family. Just to know who we really are."

"I think you already do know who you really ARE, M...Mr. Melville," Scully said, finally tearing her eyes away from their joined hands to look once more at the face of her ex-partner. "Does who you WERE matter that much, really?"

"I want to know what happened to Starbuck," Mulder insisted, stubborn as always.

"We ALL want to know," Cyndi added, leaning forward and pressing her will out on Scully with the force of her steely eyes and her equally steely personality. "I want to be able to tell her myself that... that he's ok. And that he has been ok, all this time. I'd like to be able to do that before I die. It would mean a great deal to me."

"I just want to know that They didn't take her," Mulder said, holding his wife's hand tighter for reassurance. "That she's all right. I want to be able to stop dreaming about her being hurt."

"And what if the knowledge would put you back in the kind of danger that led to your being attacked in the first place?" Scully asked him. 

"That would put your family in the same kind of danger - your wife, your children, your grandchildren. Would you want to know then?"

"What makes you think something like that would happen?" Mulder asked, and he was going to continue, when Cyndi leaned forward and interrupted.

You know something don't you, Dr. Scully," she said excitedly, pointing at the photograph that still sat facing Scully on the tabletop. "You know something about my husband! That was why you fainted up there on the cliff. You knew him. You recognized him, didn't you?"

Scully caught herself as she began to wonder if Cyndi Melville wasn't psychic.

"Cyndi, now who's making up....." Mulder began affectionately, and then he looked at Scully, really looked at her. And there must have been something there, no matter how she was struggling to keep her expression studiously, professionally blank.

"Oh, my God," Mulder said, his voice suddenly small.

"

You DO know, don't you?" Cyndi pressed, clutching Mulder's hand more tightly in support. "You know who he is."

Lie. Or tell the truth? Lie, and have them know she was lying. Or tell the truth and ruin Mulder's life.

Or maybe, tell the truth, and not ruin his life. Scully made her decision quickly.

"Yes, Mrs. Melville, I do know your husband," Scully replied, amazed at her own calm professionalism, though with almost 40 years of practice it was no wonder that her mask didn't crack. "I did recognize him up there on the cliff, and I admit, it was very shocking. But I also gave myself a mighty headrush. I'm not a fainter."

"I can't imagine you could be and be a pathologist," Cyndi agreed.

"Why weren't you going to tell me?" Mulder asked. "You weren't, were you?"

"No, I wasn't," Scully replied. "I wasn't, because I saw you here and I saw that you were happy, and the man you were.... Well was not, to say the very least. Not happy, not safe, not any of the things you've built for yourself here in your life. I can't imagine you'd ever want to go back to that. I can't imagine anyone in their right mind would want to go back."

"Who was I?" Mulder asked, he was growing angry at her for making his choice for him. "Who am I? I have a right to know. I have a right to know who I am."

"Believe me, you don't want to know," Scully said.

"Why? Am I a criminal? Is that why you recognized me? Am I wanted for something?" Mulder asked. Cyndi had never let go of his hand. Scully could tell that she didn't care whether he was a criminal or not. She remembered feeling exactly the same way.

"No," Scully replied. "You're not a criminal. You WERE an FBI agent. I knew you many years ago back at the Bureau. You had a lot of enemies. Undoubtedly one of them caught up to you and is responsible for your injuries, and your amnesia. Some of them are still alive, or at least we don't know if they're dead. Some very, very dangerous people. They could come back if they know you know who you are. If they think you remember anything of what you were working on at the time. You don't want to know any of that. You wouldn't be safe knowing."

"What's my name," Mulder asked. "You can at least tell me that. If you don't I'll just contact the FBI and they'll have to tell me. They must have some way of proving my identity. Aren't you guys fingerprinted?"

"We're a lot more than that. They know everything about us, right down to our genetic makeup," Scully told him. "You wouldn't have a difficult time proving your identity. You simply shouldn't. You had enemies at the Bureau, too."

"You make him sound like James Bond, or something," Cyndi snorted, obviously not taking Scully's warning very seriously.

"James Bond was a spy. Mulder was a whistle-blower," Scully replied. "But they're both incredibly dangerous things to be and don't win you any friends."

"That's my name? Mulder?" Mulder asked.

"Yes. Special Agent Fox William Mulder, badge number JTT047101111, used to reside at 2630 Hegel Place, Apartment 42, Alexandria, Virginia. Disappeared the day after his thirty-ninth birthday, October 14, 2001. Never found despite an extensive investigation by a task force of his colleagues. I was one of them. The case is officially still open, though now it's been classified as an X-File. Ironic in the extreme, though you don't remember it."

"What's an X-File?" Scott piped up to ask.

"The X-Files are unsolved cases," Scully replied. "Mulder was in charge of the X-Files division when he was at the FBI. So he's become one of the cases he was responsible for solving. Until now, of course."

"My parents named me Fox?" Mulder said incredulously. "They must not have liked me much. How did I manage to not get killed growing up?"

"I think you were pretty tough," Scully told him. "And pretty smart. And you made everyone call you Mulder. So the Fox thing pretty much went away. At least at the Bureau."

"Well that's good to know," Mulder wore a look of extreme distaste.

"But what about Starbuck? Do you know who Starbuck is?"

"Your partner at the Bureau," Scully replied. "On the X-Files. She was abducted while the two of you worked together. Abducted and... well, tortured, I guess, is the best way to explain it. You're probably just remembering that. That's why you have the dreams."

"Did I find her?" Mulder asked. He looked tortured, himself. He looked haunted.

"She was.... returned eventually by the people who took her," Scully said, calmly, with clinical detachment. "She was... fine. There's nothing to worry about. But that's really all I can tell you, Mulder. That's all I can tell you and have you stay safe."

"But, what about my family? Did I have a wife? Was I married to Starbuck, because I remember...? Did we have kids?" Mulder asked anxiously.

"No," Scully said quickly. Cyndi frowned. "Though I found out you HAD actually been married once, not to your partner, but you divorced many years before your disappearance. Your father and mother are both dead, and your sister, Samantha, the girl in the other picture.....she was abducted from your family home when she was eight years old and you were twelve. She was never found. She's the reason you became an FBI agent in the first place. To find her and to help other people like her, like your family. But they're all gone now, Mulder.

"The only family you have is here. And I don't want to put them in any danger by telling you more," Scully rose from her seat at Mulder's table.

"You know enough now that you can find out more on your own if you really want to," she said. "I probably, no, I know I shouldn't have told you even what I have, but I'm going to leave it up to you. But I BEG you, Mulder, don't go looking. You won't like what you find. You won't like any of it. And what you have here is so good. And all of that would just spoil it."

"But what about HER?" Mulder said, standing up as if to prevent her from leaving. "What about Starbuck? What's her name? Where is she? Do you know her?"

"Yes, I do know her, Mulder," Scully told him. "I investigated your disappearance, remember? And I know that she wouldn't want you to look for her. Not after all these years. She wouldn't want you jeopardizing your family for something like that. She only wanted you to be happy. And you never were, all the while she knew you. You obviously are now. That's what she wanted for you."

"Look at THEM, Mulder," Scully pointed at his wife, his granddaughter. "Do you really want to put them on the line for something that was over thirty years ago?"

"Was over," Mulder said rounding the table to her side of it. "Then there was something, wasn't there? Something to be over. Someone to be left behind. I left her behind, didn't I? Don't tell me it wasn't true."

"Thirty years ago, Mulder," Scully told him. "And, according to her, it wasn't anything. She's always maintained that the two of you were not involved other than professionally."

"Then she wasn't telling you the truth. You saw the picture," Mulder stated, obviously not believing a word she said. "What did it look like to you?"

"I was there when the picture was taken, Mulder," Scully said, moving closer to the door and escape. "I didn't see anything that was inappropriate for friends at an awards ceremony. No one else did, either. You don't have to worry about your partner. She's fine."

"But where is she? What's happened to her?" Mulder took another step toward her, but Scully had her hand on the doorknob.

"I'm not going to tell you any more," Scully said, holding up a hand to make him keep his distance. "You need time to think about this. To think seriously about it. Before you do anything that will jeopardize your life. You can't just ditch your family and go running off after thirty year old ghosts. You know who you are now. Who you were. Who the people in the photographs are. You said that was what you wanted. Well, you've gotten what you wanted.

"But think. What difference does it really make? Are you any different now than you were half an hour ago? Are you a different person? Do you remember any of it?"

"No, but I might remember," Mulder said hopefully.

"But you don't. And you probably won't, no matter how hard you try," Scully told him, opening up the door to hear Moby's welcoming bark. They had him inside the rickety fence. "All we are, all any of us are, is the sum total of our memories and personal experience. You had the first thirty-nine years of your life excised from your memory, including all of the things that made you who you were. You've made yourself someone else now. You ARE someone else now. Why look back? Looking forever to the past never does anyone any good. It only leads to ruin. Like for Blanche DuBois, or Lot's Wife. You don't want to be like that, do you? Always trying to recapture a past that no longer exists.

"Let it go, Mulder. Let it go and be happy," Scully said stepping

through the door and motioning the huge hound to her side. "It's the

best advice I can give you. It's what you should do.

"Thank, you Cyndi, for your hospitality. It was nice meeting you all. It was nice to find out that things came out all right for him. It's not often that happens for us. Usually... usually things aren't all right."

"Thank you, Agent Scully," Cyndi came up beside Mulder in the doorway. She put her arms affectionately around her husband's waist, and Mulder's arm automatically found its way around his wife. "For everything."

Scully smiled at her. Because, just by looking at her, she realized that Cyndi knew. Even if Mulder hadn't put the pieces together yet. Even if he never did. Cyndi knew. She knew and she acknowledged the gift she had been given. The opportunity to keep her husband as she knew him, not as some stranger from before they'd met.

Scully nodded. She turned to the gate and walked through it without looking back. And she followed Moby back to their rented cottage far along the beach.

That night Mulder dreamed of Starbuck. And the dream was as it always was, a dream of loss, of desolation, of loneliness so intense that it made him wish he could die so it would end the sooner. So that the pain would finally end because finding her again would be impossible. He and Cyndi had talked about it. Talked well into the night. And they had decided not to look any further. That he knew the important things already. And that Agent Scully had been right, looking wouldn't make a difference because he didn't remember. It would have no effect on the person he now was.

But that night the dream had returned, more terrible now than ever. And Starbuck had been reft from him once more. Pulled out of his very arms and swept away into the darkness. He could see her there in the darkness, just out of his reach, her blue eyes wide with fear and betrayal, her red-gold hair billowing out as though she were under water, as her hands reached back toward him - a lifeline that could return him to her side.

Her skin was so pale, and she trembled as though from cold. Her lips were turning blue, from chill, or lack of oxygen, but still she reached out to him, reached back through the darkness of the water. Mulder tried, he tried to reach her, he swam and swam as fast as he could and reached out for her hands, but he could never come any closer while she just grew colder and grayer in the darkness. Finally, her blue eyes closed, their light lost to him, and her arms ceased reaching back. And she floated away into the darkness of the water. Starbuck was lost beneath the waves.

And Mulder woke at last, crying out her name, as he always did when he dreamed of her. But this time, for the first time since he could remember, the name he cried was not Starbuck.

Cyndi had come with him when he'd leaped from their bed in the pre-dawn gray. She'd followed him as fast as her shorter legs could carry her as he ran up the beach the way Scully had gone. She had to go. Had to go or lose him.

Because he remembered. He remembered something, at least. And it had changed him. He was already like a different person. Not the steady, quiet man she'd loved for nearly thirty years. Not the man whose children she'd bourne or the one she'd stood beside at the grave of their only daughter, dead of cancer at twenty-four, while he slowly came apart.

This man, this Mulder, was another man entirely. A madman, filled with intensity and a pain so great she didn't know how he could stand beneath its weight. It was what Scully, what Starbuck, for there was no question in Cyndi's mind that that was who the woman had been, had tried to spare him by telling him so little.

But in this case even a little had been too much.

It had changed him.

And Cyndi knew that no matter what happened next, her husband was never really coming back. And she finally knew, really knew, what it must have been like for her, for Starbuck. Only for her it had dragged on and on for thirty years. And for Cyndi it had hit all at once like a devastating tidal wave, or an avalanche of pain. She wasn't certain which was worse.

And the dog was on the beach.

She could see him there, at the edge of the water, running back and forth, trying to bark. But it was obvious that he'd been at it so long that he'd lost his voice.

So she was efficient, too. You could say that for her.

Cyndi stopped running, though her husband did not.

He must have known. He must have known what had happened already, even as she did. As soon as she saw the dog.

When he reached the animal it came up to him and whined. Then it ran out at the water, and looked back at the man for help. Cyndi could see the footprints now, in the dry sand up the beach. One set of human ones beside those of the dog. The human footprints only went one way and disappeared into the churned-up sand where the dog had done its mad

back and forth pacing at the water's edge.

It didn't take a genius to realize the implication.

Her husband looked out at the water, and she could see the tears running down his face. Then he turned and bolted inside the house.

"Scully!" he shouted. "Scully! Where are you? Scully! Scully!"

Cyndi watched him through the picture windows as he rushed from room to room, turning on lights, looking behind doors. As if he could magically manufacture the small gray-haired woman who had been his partner out of some cabinet.

She watched him, though she could hardly bear to. When he fell to the floor in the living room of the rented cottage, for the first time in all their married life, she didn't go to him when he was in pain. What could she say? What could anyone say in a situation like this? Had there ever been a situation like this?

Cyndi turned instead to the east, to the ocean where the rosy-fingered dawn touched the top of the waves with pink and gold like the opening stanza of some epic poem.

Until now she'd always loved the sea. For years it had been her friend, it had rejuvenated her, renewed her. It was why she'd been so happy to leave their home in Boston and retire here to the beach. She had loved the sea until today when it had closed over the head of her husband's partner, and of her husband, and of her happy home. Now they all were drowning. And she realized that the sea was dark, and deep, and wild, and all the wicked things that Melville had written when she had all along believed it was her friend.

And she would have to look at the sea now. Look at it every day of her life and remember. Remember how the sea had ended everything when Starbuck had decided to go down with the ship.

Cyndi turned away from the sea and went inside the house. Someone would have to take care of things. And she knew it would have to be her.

The Coast Guard still hadn't found Scully's body three days after her disappearance when the police finally told them they would have to give no more statements and let them go home to rest. But Cyndi knew there would be no resting. Not considering the weight and import of what she carried in her pocket. The envelope for her husband that Starbuck had left behind. Cyndi had found it inside the cottage along with the woman's other possessions, and had first thought to leave it alone along with the neatly stamped and addressed envelope for one Maggie Scully, C/O Bill Scully in Annapolis, Maryland.

But it had been clearly marked with her husband's name, Bill Melville. And if Scully had done what she had done to keep them safe, Cyndi was going to take her seriously. She couldn't let whatever was in that envelope fall into the hands of the police. She'd placed it in her pocket, sure to give it to the right man, as anyone would have done if they'd come along days later to find the house empty. Oh she was good, Agent Scully was. She wanted to be certain he got it, and Fox Mulder had been missing for thirty years.

But Cyndi hadn't given it to him. He'd been too distraught, too destroyed by loss. She'd been afraid of what he might do should he read his former partner's words. So she'd kept it. Kept it and kept it to herself all through the questioning. Waiting for him to be calm enough. Waiting for him to be Bill again. But she'd begun to realize, he never would be Bill, not anymore.

Cyndi Melville was quite certain that she'd never see Bill again. Or touch him. Or be his wife, even though their 28th wedding anniversary was in less than a month. Because Bill Melville had gone away the moment Fox Mulder had been reborn. And Cyndi Melville didn't know Fox Mulder. And Fox Mulder had, apparently, very little interest in knowing her.

Fox Mulder slept on the couch in the den. He had since the day they'd found the dog on the beach, the dog that had had to be shot when he'd savaged the police deputy who had tried to remove him from his position at the point where his mistress had disappeared. Cyndi was beginning to wonder if Fox Mulder wouldn't have to be destroyed as well.

But maybe Scully had taken care of that already. Maybe she was holding that in her hand right now.

But Cyndi never hesitated. He would only hate her more if she tried to conceal it from him further.

"Mulder?" she said, hating the sound of that name in her own mouth. But it was what he'd insisted she call him. He refused to answer to Bill.

"Yes?" he said, his voice still raw from weeping, though he wasn't actually weeping at the moment.

"I brought this for you. From the....from the cottage," Cyndi told him. "It's a letter. I found it that morning, but with all of the police around...I... I didn't think I should give it to you. She said you'd be in danger if anyone found out."

He rose from his seat on the couch and moved slowly toward her, hand outstretched to take the envelope from her grasp.

For the first time, Cyndi thought he looked like an old man.

He reached out and took it into his hands and he looked at it for a long moment.

"

Thank you, Cyndi," he said softly. "I'm....I'm sorry."

"For what?" Cyndi asked. Because she really wanted to know. Because she believed that the thing that Fox Mulder was really sorry about was the past thirty years. For having been happy. For her, for their children, for every joy his life had ever contained.

"For being such a total prick," he said, looking at the letter and not at her. "You don't deserve this. You never did. Or maybe what I mean is that I never did. Deserve this, deserve you."

"She didn't think so, Mulder," Cyndi told him. "And I bet that that's exactly what she's going to say in that letter, too."

"You didn't know her," Mulder said.

"But I know she loved you. That she wanted you to be happy," Cyndi wished he would look at her. "She thought you deserved it. She begged you to be happy. You should remember that."

He just looked down at the envelope in his hands and ran his thumbs over the rounded script of his name. She knew better than to expect him to say anything more. So Cyndi went out the door to leave them alone. Because it seemed like that was what she was doing, so real was the presence of his lost partner inside that room.

Mulder,

I've been sitting here staring at this blank piece of paper now for about ten minutes straight. The decision was so easy, it amazes me that the writing of a simple note should be so hard. But the fact that you don't remember any of it makes it almost impossible for me to think of anything to say.

So I'll just tell you again. That I'm serious. That it would be too dangerous for you to go back to who you were before. That if you'd stayed that man you never would have been able to have the things you have, or achieve the things you've done. You would have been too crippled by the constant threats, and the fear of repercussions to do anything - to ever be happy.

I know because I've lived that way. And it's hard. Too hard to ask anyone else to share. The price is too great.

Do you know what I would have given to have had the chance that you've had, Mulder? Do you know how unbelievably happy it's made me to know that you DID have it?

That's why I can't allow you to fuck it up.

And when you found out about me, you'd do something to give yourself away. So I'm just going to tell you, so you understand my decision. And so that you'll have no more unanswered questions, so you won't have to go looking. Finally, the explanation for something is all right there for you in a neat, little package.

I know that you'll find the cottage first. You won't be able to resist trying to talk to me again, so I'm hoping that this note will reach you and no one else. Whatever you do, don't show it to anyone. Except Cyndi, because she'll understand. Maybe better than you will. She was on to me right away. She should have been a profiler for the FBI.

I know you don't remember me. That you didn't remember. But, I'm Starbuck. It's the nickname my father gave me when I was a little girl. I don't know why that was what you remembered, you never called me that, but it must have meant something to you. You're the psychologist. You figure it out. Get help. Serious psychotherapy would probably have been good for the both of us back in the day.

I don't want to go into the details of what it was like. Of what you meant to me, because I was never really certain what I meant to you. If I was really a person, or if I was some kind of symbol to you, or maybe both. As I said, I never really knew, even when you tried to tell me. I'm not certain that you did, either, or maybe I just didn't speak your language or know how to listen. But you were then, and still are, the most significant thing in my life. And I'm not certain whether that's a good thing or a bad one, or if you can put a judgment so simple on it at all. But your significance is my excuse, my reason to do something I've wanted to do for a long time. But I've never been able to do anything that was just for myself, no matter how much I wanted to. Doing something just for me always seemed so, so SELFISH. And being selfish isn't right. But now, I can do it for more than me. And here's why.

I'm the only one left, Mulder. I'm the only one left that remembers. I'm the only thing left that could tie you to the past. Alex Krycek is still out there somewhere unaccounted for, but the rest of them are dead. I'm hoping Krycek wised up and got out of it, because I haven't heard from him or heard of him in so very many years. Maybe it's been so long now that he just doesn't care anymore. So that leaves me, and my memories of what happened, of the, well there's really no other word to describe it - horror - we endured. And if I'm gone, you're free.

And most importantly, you're safe. And your family will be safe. And I will have been able to help you do that. It makes me feel good, and it's been a long time since anything did that. That my going could do someone some good gives me great joy.

And I really WANT to be gone, Mulder. I've wanted it for years and years. I'm so very, very tired.

So there's only a few more things to do. Sorry I've gone on so long already. I didn't mean to. But I've missed talking to you. And being able to talk to you and say everything I have to say without you interrupting is a fantasy I just have to carry out.

I've contacted the Gunmen. You won't remember them, but they were your friends many years ago. Byers and Langly will be going to my house and packing up some things of yours that I was given when I cleaned out your apartment, and later when your mother, Teena, passed away. These things belong to you. Many of them are family things, pictures, documents, sentimental objects. You won't have any association with them, but they are yours, and are part of who you are. You should have them.

They will be forwarded to the post office in New Haven, general delivery, under the name of Bill Melville. You can pick them up if you decide you want them.

The Gunmen are also sending some of the things Frohike had saved. I hope they don't turn out to be totally inappropriate.

They were very happy to hear you were well, Mulder. They may contact you, but they will be certain to do it in a way that won't be detected. They're very good at it.

I only wish Frohike were still alive to join them, but we lost him last summer. I kept forgetting how much older he was than the rest of us.

And there are two other things in this envelope as well. The cross is mine. My mother gave it to me on my sixteenth birthday and I always wore it. It came to have some small significance to you after my abduction. I would like you to have it again now. Please do whatever you like with it. Keep it, or give it to your granddaughter. It's pretty, she might like it.

The ring is yours. You gave it to me about a month before you disappeared, surprisingly enough after a nice dinner out, which was extremely unusual for us. Even though you knew we couldn't show it to anyone, you wanted me to have it anyway. At least that's what you said. Even if things hadn't happened as they did, we never would have had the chance to use it. You know that, don't you? If you don't, trust me on this one. You used to say I was the only one you trusted, and I'm telling you the truth now. It was a beautiful gesture, but it was doomed before it had even been made, and for the same reason that you can't let them find you now.

Please don't do anything to let them find you.

I guess that's it, Mulder.

And it's funny. I came up here this weekend, to the place where you grew up, to say goodbye to you. And now I have the chance to actually do it.

Do you know how wonderful that is?

Now put this away and forget about it. You have a beautiful life and a beautiful family and all the ugly things from your past need to go away. Please, let them go, Mulder.

Love, (See, I finally wrote it)

Scully

Mulder almost bowled her over as he ran from the den, his face contorted in pain and his eyes streaming tears so that he was nearly blinded by them. Cyndi watched him run out onto the beach, and she feared for a moment that he intended to throw himself into the ocean after his Starbuck. But he only threw himself down onto the sand at the waters' edge to cry out and tear at it with his hands, much as the great, white dog had done just before the policemen had had to shoot him.

Cyndi felt almost detached as she wondered whether someone would have to do the same thing for her husband.

She watched him howl his rage and pain to the depths of the ocean for some minutes before she went into the den to see what Starbuck had said to him. The letter was there, open on the coffee table, somewhat crumpled from where he'd gripped it as he'd read and the ink running in spots from the moisture of his tears. It was horrible, of course, that testament to his pain, but what knocked the wind out of Cyndi and made her have to sit down on the old, sleeper sofa beside the coffee table was the testament to hers. The pain she was feeling now, herself, and had been for more than a week.

The pain Starbuck had had to endure for nearly thirty years.

Cyndi just stared at it, unable to bring herself to touch it as it glittered back at her in the low light like the cold eye of a cobra waiting to strike. It had come out of the letter, obviously with the small, gold cross. A perfect and perfectly tasteful one-carat solitaire diamond engagement ring.

Cyndi felt like she was having a heart attack.

She'd heard about what they felt like, shooting pains and then numbness. Well, that was what she was experiencing. Her chest had constricted beyond the point of any ability to breathe and her hands had begun to shake, but she couldn't feel them anymore at all.

She didn't know what to do - for the first time in her life. She had spent her lifetime healing people who were broken, helping them to find and regain the strength they had lost. She didn't know what to do for something like this. Especially now that she knew that he remembered.

Cyndi felt like she was going to die, drowned under the weight of all their pain, all their losses.

She felt like she was going to die. But then she heard him, footsteps hesitant on the wood of the floor, coming back inside the house.

"Cyndi?" her husband asked in a broken voice she'd become all too  
familiar with in the past week. It was not a voice she liked. But it  
was his, and he was there. He was calling for her. He'd come back  
inside away from the wine-dark sea. He'd come back to her.  
And that was all Cyndi Melville needed to know.

The Scully Suicide as it was called, caused a small ripple of gossip in the cafeteria of the Hoover Building for the better part of a week.

All sorts of old stories about Spooky Mulder and his partner resurfaced and were chewed over thoroughly by all the agents. Both those who remembered them, and those who didn't, like John Wing.

She'd apparently had it in mind the whole time. To kill herself before she retired, in the place where her partner had grown up. She'd written as much in her e-mail to Director Skinner and the other Venerables.

Wing felt sorry for the old couple who had found her dog. What an awful thing to have to discover almost next door.

But there'd been no body. That was something of a relief. At least she'd done it clean.

The Coast Guard was keeping an eye out for it, and that was all that anyone could do. With her note, at the testimony of the neighbors, they hadn't even had to open a missing person's case. Clear suicide.

But it still bothered John. Not so much because she'd offed herself, it wasn't uncommon in retired law enforcement officers, but that she'd never found him. She'd never found her partner.

It had become almost like an obsession with him, to understand her devotion, her despair at his loss. Partners were sacred. He knew that, but this was so much more. John just didn't understand why no one else seemed to realize that.

He wasn't getting along well with his own partner. He didn't like Velazquez's callously superior attitude toward the people they were supposed to help. And he knew she thought he was a wimp for that.

He'd thought that being paired with a woman would have allowed him to escape some of that macho shit.

Wing knew that if he disappeared, or got shot, or whatever, she'd barely lift a finger to try to find him. And Scully had looked for thirty years, finally killing herself in despair just as she would lose her authority to carry on the search.

Wing wanted to know about them. He wanted to know what had forged that kind of devotion. He'd heard all the stories about them being lovers, about the wild orgies in the basement of the Hoover building, about Mulder's perverted nature. But cheap sex didn't make you search for someone for thirty years. Wing didn't believe it.

Everyone he knew viewed them as laughingstocks. But he'd yet to meet anyone who actually remembered Mulder, or Scully from the time they'd worked together. Or anyone who remembered their work or could tell him what the X-Files were really all about. Everyone was long retired, and most were dead. Everyone except Director Skinner, and he wasn't someone you could ask questions of.

But Wing had come to a weird kind of a decision. One he hadn't shared with his partner. He was going to find out what had really gone on.

He was going to find out what the X-Files really had been. What Mulder and Scully really had been. Even if there was no one left who remembered.

The files, the ones post 1998, or the ones that Mulder had reconstructed from bits of charred paper after the devastating fire that had destroyed the X-Files office, were still in the basement. And Wing was going to read them. All of them. Until he knew. Until he understood what had driven Scully to do what she had done.

Or until he found Mulder.

The Truth was there. He just had to find it.


End file.
